Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Bill Cosby -- mentor?

Not to just pile on, but this is an article I wrote about Bill Cosby for this blog a couple of years ago that was picked up by Gawker recently, resulting in a lot of traffic. So I thought I would share it again for my regular readers.

I’ve always been a big fan of Bill Cosby. Loved his comedy albums as a
kid, took my wife to Las Vegas to see his stand-up act (more like a
sit-down act. He just sat in a chair, smoked a cigar, and held a giant
audience in the palm of his hand), and admired THE COSBY SHOW (at least
when it started). He was a true original and his comedy came out of
reality. You laughed because you related. He was also a damn good spokesman for Jello. So I respect his work. We’re clear on that, right?

Recently, WRITTEN BY, the WGA’s monthly magazine did an article where
they referred to Bill Cosby as a writer’s mentor. I think they were
being a little overly generous. I wouldn’t call him a mentor.

I’d call him an egotist who worked his writers as if they were pack mules.

I know. You say potato and I say potato.

There’s no question that there was much to be learned from Bill Cosby,
and those writers who survived did take lessons that helped them in
their future work. But what a cost.

The article explains how the process worked on THE COSBY SHOW. The
staff worked out a very rough story area on Wednesday, then wrote an
entire script over the weekend. Cosby would shit on it at the table
reading on Monday. If there were lines he didn’t like he would read
them in funny voices. Rather rude to the writers who killed themselves
all weekend to service you. Then would come the hours of notes, Cosby
would tear the whole script apart. Often, with his big cigar, he would
literally blow smoke into the writers' faces. And then the staff went
back to now write a completely new script and cough. Those rewrites,
even in the article, were termed grueling.

And this went on week after week. Hundred hour weeks were common. Month after month. At least he didn't smoke $2 Tiparillos.

Oh, and did I mention, at the end, Cosby ad libbed stuff? I’m sure it
was funny but why put everybody through that just to ultimately do it
yourself?

Talented showrunners would understandably bolt after a season or even a
few weeks of this. One writer was so fried after she quit that she
spent six months working at the Coney Island Aquarium.

Are there shows with long hours? Absolutely. Is it difficult to
write for a comedian who has a very strong voice? You betcha. But you
know that going in.

However, to have a star just arbitrarily toss out draft after draft and
force his staff to write around the clock for seven months is unfair and
highly disrespectful.

I don’t know why the staff bothered to do anything for the table
draft. Why work hard crafting jokes and scenes and moments when
everything's just going to be dismissed? Just write down the first
thing that comes to your mind and head for the train. The fact that
the staff didn’t do that (and never did that) says something about how
admirable and professional they were.

Fact: Writers burn out. Fact: Writers do not do their best work at
4:00 AM after being in the room for fifteen hours. How would an actor
like it if he were asked to strenuously rehearse every day from 7:00 AM
until 11:00 PM and then an audience would be brought in and he'd be
asked to perform NOISES OFF for two hours?

The fact that Cosby established this grueling schedule and maintained it
shows, to me, a lack of consideration and compassion. Yes, the show
was a smash hit, and he was the 800 pound gorilla, but I will never be
convinced it would have been any worse had the writers not spent 70% of
their time writing material that everyone knew was gong to get thrown
out. I could however, make an argument that the shows would have been
even better had the staff not been walking zombies. And if some of the better writers had not quit.

But that’s the way they did it. A number of people made fortunes of
money (including sweater manufacturers). And the show is a classic.

Call Cosby brilliant, call him the man who saved sitcoms, call him a
game-changer, a visionary, a titan in the world of comedy. But mentor? I was fortunate that I had mentors who didn’t send me screaming to an aquarium.

50 comments
:

One thing I've learned in life is that celebrities have a public face and a private face. Cosby's private face is being exposed and given the number of allegations, I don't think he'll be able to buy his way out of it. He chastised comics like Eddie Murphy for working "blue" yet profanity wasn't foreign coming out of his mouth in private settings. I know from people who were around him when it happened.

Jack Benny was a TV star who valued writers and would work with them to make sure the best script was cranked out without beating them up. Clint Eastwood is a director I admire, not only because of the prolific work he's done late in life but also the respect he gives to the written word. He didn't change a word of Gran Torino, a script that had its genesis on the back of napkins in a Minneapolis bar.

Well done piece BTW and I'm sure you received a lot of kudos from writers for having their backs.

Call Cosby brilliant, call him the man who saved sitcoms, call him a game-changer, a visionary, a titan in the world of comedy

I've never thought of him as any of those. This has nothing to do with the current headlines, I've just never found him funny. The Cosby Show was one of the most bland sitcoms ever made and, to be completely honest, what I would call very gentle/simple humour. I'm not just saying this because it's Ken's blog but when I was growing up, the sitcom of choice we watched was a little show called Cheers that was broadcast every Friday at 10pm on Channel 4. Whenever I did tune into The Cosby Show, I found its comedy to be very, very basic.

I read a hilarious interview years ago with Paul Weiland, the poor guy who got lumbered with the unenviable task of directing Leonard: Part 6, the movie that Columbia thought would bust many blocks. I can't remember all the details but he basically agreed to direct it without really knowing much about Cosby. What was amusing is that Weiland recounted that after he signed to direct the film, he went to watch Cosby's old films and listen to his albums and found to his horror that he didn't think any of them were funny. I think his actual quote was "Had this guy ever been funny?" But it was too late and he was locked in to direct the movie.

We do have one thing to thank Cosby for. Married With Children was conceived as an anti-Cosby (original working title "NOT THE COSBYS"), and that in my opinion is one of the best, funniest, sitcoms ever.

By the way, I'm very jealous you guys in the States and Canada will get to see the first teaser for STAR WARS EPISODE VII this weekend at selected cinemas! I won't lie, I'm excited as hell for this movie and can't wait to see the first glimpse at the footage.

The Cosby Show was the opposite of every other sitcom, because its pilot show was the funniest episode in the entire series. After that it just got steadily worse. Toward the end, when every guest role was filled by retired jazz singers instead of actors, it was just about unwatchable.

MikeK.Pa. said..."One thing I've learned in life is that celebrities have a public face and a private face."

I think you meant to say SOME celebrities. While the nature of the job attracts qualified psychopaths, there are many who arrived not primarily as fame seekers, but as craftsmen and artists who became successful, remain craftsmen and artists, and are some of the best people you could ever hope to meet.I'll bet you Ken knows a few.

I'm with Hamid. When "Cosby" was the big dog of NBC's "Must-See" Thursday line-up, I seldom bothered to tune in until after it and "A Different World" were over. Both were too simplistic (I categorize them with "Saved By The Bell" rather than "Cheers" or "Friends") and too preachy for me. I hate sitcoms that are so obvious about their "social message of the week" that you can figure it out just from the ethnicity/sexuality of the guest star and whether he/she faced bullying, prejudice or temptation to sin before the first commercial. I do fondly recall the economics lesson with Theo from the pilot, but I can't remember much else about the series except sanctimoniousness and ugly sweaters.

Cosby's comedy was always thin, thin broth, and his "uplift the race" persona was a chore to endure. I didn't need Hannibal Buress to remind me of decade-old stories that the media & public decided it didn't wanna hear about. Seeing Cosby's image shatter and his career crater like Arthur Godfrey's (times 100) is long overdue.

And all this time I've been standing outside my "I Hate Cosby's Eighties Sitcom" museum and wondering why nobody wanted to come inside. Now with the...allegations...going around I'm sure I'll see some foot traffic, which I'll angrily send packing because the Museum does not encourage gloating.

One thing I love about this blog is the utter predictability of the comments. Whenever Ken writes something critical of something or somebody, the sycophants are inevitably there to pile on with the "yeah, me too" remarks, always amping up Ken's criticisms to cartoonish proportions, everyone working to see who can get the meanest and most hateful about whatever the bitch du jour may be, being careful to take a moment to assure Ken that MASH, CHEERS and FRASIER are the only sitcoms that ever mattered and the only sitcoms they've ever watched.

Lud, I can't speak for the others but maybe you should re-read my comment in which I began by quoting what Ken said, followed by my comment disagreeing with him and that I've never thought of Cosby as brilliant, etc. Not exactly "amping up Ken's criticisms to cartoonish proportions".

As one of the writers on the last season, I just want to say it wasn't like that in year eight. We only worked a couple of weekends, only worked until the early hours of the morning one time when a script had to be tossed (freelance writer, not her fault), only lost one other script so that Cosby could bring in some more of his friends to be on the show), and -- I think this was a first in the history of the show -- the writers were treated to a first class meal at an actual restaurant by Cosby shortly after we went into production. (He was not present, however.) I am not defending Cosby or even defending most of the episodes of the last season, which didn't, in my opinion, turn out as well as we had hoped. I just wanted to say it didn't stay as bad as it was the first few seasons, and the writer who had bailed out to the aquarium came back for a while.

We knew going in that hardly any of the lines that we wrote for Cliff would end up in the final script, that we were just providing a base for him to riff. (if you could make Cosby laugh at the reading, that was considered a triumph.) We had two hours after the table read for Cosby to give notes, and I don't remember that he was ever mean about it. If the script was in good shape, we had two hours of Cosby entertaining us, trying out material, and that was pretty great.

However, recent alleged events have taken all the fun out of having written for "The Cosby Show."

So when will people notice that there are fewer hits on Google for Hannibal Buress than Bill Clinton rapist?

AP plays its tapes of Bill Cosby saying repeatedly 'not going to comment.' When Sam Donaldson asks Bill Clinton about the piece that NBC News aired calling him a rapist, 'There's been a statement made by my attorney. He speaks for me, and I think he spoke quite clearly."

The footage of Bill Cosby and wife even reminds one of the Gennifer Flowers interview with Bill Clinton and wife.

Other enablers, one who hands out money orders in his own name, or feminists who invent a one free grope rule.

I've developed the personal belief that every famous person -- entertainment, politics, whatever -- has done something horrifying or shameful that they daily hope won't become public. This way, when it does become public, I'm not surprised or disillusioned.

Tom Hanks? Covered up that he ran over an Apollo astronaut at a Veteran's Day parade.Sofia Vergara? Actually a guy from Joliet, Illinois. Also, not his actual accent.Tina Fey? White supremacist.Oprah Winfrey? White supremacist.Anderson Cooper? Extraordinarily white supremacist.Taylor Swift? Remember that show "V"?

The only celebrity we can trust is Keith Richards, because he ain't hiding anything. Oh, and Jose Canseco.

Re Mike's question whether the shows in the eighth season not being as good as previous shows being related to the writers being treated better, I would have to say I don't think so. We worked hard; we just weren't mistreated. We tried to make them good. I remember we didn't allow one episode to be shown until we could fix it and it took us a long time to figure out how. (It involved cutting a bunch out and writing a new ending.)

All the ideas had to be approved by Cosby; most of them came from him. He said at the end of the season in an interview with the New York Times that the only regret he had was that he did an eighth season! So I think he was tired, the rest of the cast and crew were tired, and the writers were often puzzled how to make Cosby's ideas work. And I will say that on one occasion, we had written some really funny stuff for one of the regulars, who killed at the reading, and Cosby gradually got rid of all those funny lines (not jokes, but character-driven lines) during the rehearsal. So there was that.

I never watched The Cosby Show for whatever reason but I thought his records were great...Noah, little tiny hairs all over my face, Fat Albert...all that stuff. We listened to it over and over when I was a kid. He came to my college and, like you said, sat at a classroom-type desk up on stage with his big cigar and just talked. He was great!When these take downs of our heroes happen-sports people, entertainment people...another one recently was Jimmy Saville in England...it gives me a huge feeling of sadness. It's like, piece by piece, big sparkling chunks of what was the magical part of childhood keep getting chiseled away. I don't want to not trust people. I don't want these people to be different from the person we respect and enjoy. It's not supposed to be this way.

Mine is an old story. I grew up on Cosby's records, loved them, watched him on I, Spy, loved him. Met him when I had him on a radio show I produced, and was impressed with him. Saw his live stage show in 1974, thought it was hilarious, and that was pretty much about it.

I don't know what went on backstage at The Cosby Show, and very little of what went on in front of the cameras. I watched one episode. It was about a kid's pet dying,a goldfish or a turtle, I don't know which, and the family having a funeral for it, and I found the entire thing so cloying and and annoying that I never watched it again, ever.

And then the Jello commercials became more nauseating, the high-handed role of Comedy's Moral Arbiter more offensive (He's lost that position), and his talk show appearances more regal. In and I imagine everyone, felt horrible for him when his son was brutally murdered, but that slack he was cut has all worn off now.

Perhaps the worst thing is, I don't find the charges unbelievable. And as they mount, the photo of myself and Cosby that's been on my dining room wall for decades has come down and gone into a drawer.

Mike, in both "The Cosby Show" and "Roseanne," the power was with the stars. In the case of "Cosby," there were a lot of non-writers who had a big say in what ended up being shot. In other shows, there's network or studio interference. There are a lot of reasons shows don't turn out as well as intended, and they are not that the writers settled.

I have been a fan of Mr. Cosby since I was a child, even if my name is Albert, and the kids used to call me Fat Albert, One of the local radio stations played his comedy records overnight, and enjoyed his subtle humour. I enjoyed the Cosby Show, up until Theo Graduated and became a teacher (what was up with that). Family Ties was floundering in the ratings until Cosby helped boost it. I saw Cosby perform in Vancouver, and I enjoyed the show, even at the beginning, when he embarrassed a guy for having his cell phone on, and took the guys phone and talked to the person on the line and called the dude with the phone a drug pusher.

Yes, he came across as arrogant on talk shows, most notably Aresnio, but then a lot of Aresino's guests came off as arrogant for some reason.

When I was growing up in Walla Walla, Cosby did a show at Coordiner Hall, which was at the college. It was one of the first times that I saw a celeb in person. I guess during his time in town he made some friends and he would often return to Walla Walla to play tennis with them. Anyway, the point of this isn't that he is guily or innocent, but just something to relate.

Cosby experienced the most exteme example of karma when his only son was murdered, a loss he must live with every day. Although it was officially classified as a random attempted robbery, during which nothing was stolen and to which the perpetrator subsequently confessed, what if it was retribution tied to Cosby's appalling behavior?

The women bringng these allegations should be taken seriously, and if their claims are proven to be true, Cosby should be held accountable in a manner that gives them some peace.

A prison sentence or monetary settlement may give the women some comfort, but those judgments pale in comparison to the punishment handed down by the death of a child, especially under such violent circumstances. Cosby has to suffer that tragic loss every day of his life and perhaps contemplate how he may have unwittingly contributed.

Unless you're aware of credible information pertaining to the murder, your speculation is phenomenally offensive. The idea that his son being killed was "extreme karma" for Cosby's own behaviour is bonkers, let alone the far fetched theory that it was revenge. Karma, if one believes in such a thing, is visited upon the person concerned, not an innocent party. And since when do victims of rape or those close to the victims seek revenge by killing someone who had nothing to do with it? Good grief. This is reality, not CSI or Murder She Wrote.

On a lighter note, my TV quote of the week has to go to Tracy Letts of Homeland for his brilliantly delivered line: "What the fuck? What the fucking fuck?"

I think the worst episode is one where his father "comes out of retirement" as a pro jazz trombonist to play again with his old combo. I assume the rest of those guys were real musicians, but the father gets up there and does the worst fake trombone playing in the history of TV. He actually holds the instrument BACKWARDS. all that focus on jazz, and they couldn't even find someone who had even a first-year student's knowledge of the instrument? The actor playing the father cared so little for his craft that he never even asked how to HOLD IT?

He said at the end of the season in an interview with the New York Times that the only regret he had was that he did an eighth season!

I vaguely remember an interview with Cosby when the show was the biggest thing on TV, so IIRC the first three years, when BC said he would pull the plug after five years, which he thought was the natural lifespan of a sitcom.

I thought the show was great the first few years and then went through Cousin Oliver syndrome about eight times, back and forth across the shark tank. Letterman, a Cosby fan and friend, did a brutal parody of the late Cosby Show, riffing on how all of Sondra and Elvin's friends were Ivy Leaguers who had decided to become plumbers and dog walkers. "Theo tried to flush the ham! Why, that scamp!"

For the record, I have no information at all about the murder, and my "what if" scenario, not totally out of the realm of possibility, is pure speculation. While it may be far-fetched, I certainly didn't intend it to be offensive, and I'm sorry if you found it objectionable.

I hate to revive this thread (I do remember reading it the first time it was published, and I have mentioned it to people recently, so I'm not some Johnny-come-lately), but I made the same connection that a few other readers did to ROSEANNE. The difference seems to be that the discord on ROSEANNE was much more public, both when the show was being made and now. This is one of the only really negative accounts I have read of working on THE COSBY SHOW.

I am sure that Roseanne would argue that this was because of bias against her, and I also assume that a lot of it has to do with Roseanne being so outspoken. However, it does make me wonder why Cosby's behavior was handled more discretely.

The same goes for the current charges being leveled against Cosby. Woody Allen would be the most comparable celebrity case that I can think of, and he certainly received a lot more negative publicity for fewer charges.

Is there some reason that Cosby would be able to cover these things up when others couldn't?

About KEN LEVINE

Named one of the BEST 25 BLOGS by TIME Magazine. Ken Levine is an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/major league baseball announcer. In a career that has spanned over 30 years Ken has worked on MASH, CHEERS, FRASIER, THE SIMPSONS, WINGS, EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, BECKER, DHARMA & GREG, and has co-created three series. He and his partner wrote the feature VOLUNTEERS. Ken has also been the radio/TV play-by-play voice of the Baltimore Orioles, Seattle Mariners, San Diego Padres. and Dodger Talk. He hosts the podcast HOLLYWOOD & LEVINE

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